{"id":1568,"date":"2020-06-15T17:40:46","date_gmt":"2020-06-15T17:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1568"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:24:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:24:22","slug":"mark-purcell-the-country-house-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2020\/06\/15\/mark-purcell-the-country-house-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Purcell, The Country House Library<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Mark Purcell, The Country House Library<\/em><\/h1>\n\n
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John Edwards<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"Cover<\/a><\/svg><\/span><\/a><\/div><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Mark Purcell. The Country House Library.<\/em> New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.  352 p. Ill. ISBN 978-0-300-22740-6.  US$55.00 (hardcover).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Following work at the\nBodleian Library, Mark Purcell became responsible for libraries in the care of\nthe British National Trust, and he is now in the research-collections\ndepartment at Cambridge University. With this background, and with his own\nscholarly focus on private and country-house libraries, he was eminently\nqualified to write this fine book. It has more than 225\nillustrations, many of them in color.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purcell\nwrites that, while quite spectacular libraries are to be found in many country\nhouses, many more have been lost to dispersals, to fire, and to violence: in\nsome of the Irish \u2018Big Houses\u2019, \u2018heavy ancestral books\u2019 were used to \u2018barricade\nwindows against attack\u2019 in the disturbances of the late nineteenth and early\ntwentieth centuries (p. 10). Still, in Ireland as in England, the decline of\nthe privately-owned great house and thus of its library owed more to changing\nsocial and economic conditions than to arson or attack. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author ends his opening chapter by pointing out that the creation of the country-house library has quite ancient beginnings, adding that many more libraries existed, and many more books were actually read by their patrician owners, than has been thought. “Surviving fifteenth-century English books are commonly well thumbed and covered with jottings and scribblings” (p. 49). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Significant levels of book ownership date to the thirteenth century. Purcell describes in some detail the voracious acquisitiveness of Richard de Bury, whose famous Philobiblon <\/em>\u2013 apparently written around 1345, but only published more than a century later \u2013 might be seen as an example of bibliomania. Early collections of books were often largely devotional, of course \u2013 psalters and books of hours \u2013 but histories and “romances” were present, too, and some were very large and heavy volumes indeed: “coucher books” had to be laid flat on a table or propped up on a lectern. The author also devotes considerable attention to book “furniture”, showing how cupboards, closets, book-wheels and hanging desks gradually gave way to dedicated studies and rooms for reading.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nthe sixteenth century, a hundred books might constitute a private library, and\ninstitutional collections were small; Cambridge University had about 450 books\nand manuscripts.  Still, Lord Lumley\u2019s\nmid-century library contained some 2,600 books. The wealthy Lumley was an\naccumulator rather than a true bibliophile, but scholars and society at large\nhave always eventually profited from the activities of the Cottons, Harleys,\nHuntingtons, Morgans, Folgers, and other wealthy \u2018bibliomaniacs\u2019. By the early\neighteenth century, the library proper was well established. Lavish displays of\nbooks, along with cabinets of curiosities and private museums, became more and\nmore popular \u2013 and, regardless of any real use made of them by their owners,\nconstituted an important part of rich houses. Later attention to sumptuous bindings\nreveals a similar combination of interest, care, and wealth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The late seventeenth century marked the beginnings of serious and persistent book collecting among wealthy patrons. Many were influenced by Gabriel Naud\u00e9\u2019s little book, published in 1661 as Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library. <\/em>A century later, Thomas Chippendale\u2019s catalogue, the Director<\/em>, would be consulted for narrower but increasingly important recommendations for library furniture of all types, including bookcases, shelving, tables, ladders, and “metamorphic” library chairs and steps. Librarians and cataloguers also now came into their own, as did the further development of the library into a sitting or receiving room. Although not mentioned by Purcell, the opulent double library of Highclere Castle \u2013 seen by millions as Downton Abbey \u2013 stands as an example of extended use and display.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\nthe last quarter of the eighteenth century, changing fortunes meant that some important\ncollections were being sold for much less than their purchase. The\never-increasing attention to the place of a library in a great country house, however,\ntogether with resurgent means, contributed to a renewed \u2018bibliomania\u2019 in the\nearly nineteenth century. No account of this phenomenon can omit mention of the\nlife and writings of Thomas Frognall Dibdin. Its title drawing upon an earlier\ncoinage, Bibliomania <\/em>was a very small\n1809 publication, but two years later Dibdin had enlarged it to a tome of\nalmost 800 pages. At the famous Roxburghe sale of 1812, a first edition of\nBoccaccio\u2019s Decameron <\/em>went for \u00a32,260\n\u2013 a huge amount, considering that newspaper advertisements of the time offered\na piano for about \u00a320, or a year\u2019s lease on a very large London coffee-house\nfor less than \u00a32,000. Seven years later, the bubble having burst, the losing\nbidder bought the Boccaccio for \u00a3980. One of those present at the Roxburghe\nsale was Richard Heber, whose own collection of 150,000 books was housed in\nseven or eight houses in England and on the continent. It was Heber who\nfamously argued that a gentleman required three copies of every book: one for\nshow, one to read, and one to lend.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ncoming of the industrial age meant new money, new country-house owners, and new\ninterest in private libraries. It also meant the rise of important booksellers,\nlike Bernard Quaritch and Maggs Brothers, both established in the middle of the\nnineteenth century in London. Somewhat later, the famous Dr. Rosenbach of\nPhiladelphia assisted many rich American collectors in the harvest of books\nfrom English country-house collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While\ninterest in the cultural heritage of the country house slowly grew after the\nsecond world war, it took the sequential arrivals from the British Library of\nJohn Fuggles, Nicholas Barker and Mark Purcell himself for National Trust\nattention to the books and libraries in its care to reach a satisfactory level.\nPurcell\u2019s overall conclusion is that, while the fortunes of important private\nlibraries will continue to wax and wane with those of their owners, collections\nnow owned or supported by public funding are likely to flourish, since their\nvalue for social and cultural research has never been so widely acknowledged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purcell\u2019s\nbook is an excellent example of a thoroughgoing discussion that is appropriately\naccompanied by pictures; it is not a picture book fleshed out with commentary.\nIts 300 pages of text and 50 pages of notes and reference provide a fine\nintroduction to an important part of book history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John\nEdwards<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lunenburg,\nNova Scotia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following work at the Bodleian Library, Mark Purcell became responsible for libraries in the care of the British National Trust, and he is now in the research-collections department at Cambridge University. With this background, and with his own scholarly focus on private and country-house libraries, he was eminently qualified to write this fine book. It has more than 225 illustrations, many of them in color. \u261b \u261e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1570,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1930,1936],"class_list":["post-1568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-europe","tag-libraries"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5696,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/5696"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}